You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am Yahweh your God.
Not to oppress or wrong the weak or vulnerable
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא תוֹנוּ אִישׁ אֶת־עֲמִיתוֹ וְיָרֵאתָ מֵאֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מהונות קצתנו את קצתנו בדברים. והוא שנאמר לו מאמרים יכעיסוהו ויבהילוהו ולא יוכל לעמוד מפני שיתבייש מהם כמו שתזכור פעולת נערותו ועשה תשובה מהם ותאמר לו מי העתיקך מהדבר הפלוני אל זה הענין הטוב, ובזה נאמר לא תונו זה אונאת דברים. ולשון ספרא אמרו ולא תונו איש את עמיתו זו אונאת דברים (אמור) שאם היה בעל תשובה לא יאמר לו זכור מעשיך הראשונים וכו' לא יאמר לו בכמה חפץ זה וכו' ואמרו גדולה אונאת דברים מאונאת ממון שבאונאת ממון נאמר אל תונו ובאונאת דברים הוא אומר ויראת מאלהיך. וכבר נתבארו משפטי מצוה זו בא' ממציעא. (שם, שם):
He prohibited some of us from wronging others of us with words. And that is that we say statements to [someone] that anger him or bewilder him, such that he cannot stand up to them, due to his being shamed. Such as [if] you remind him of the actions of his youth, and he has repented from them - but you say to him, "Who brought you from out of thing x to this proper condition?" And it is about this that it is stated, "you shall not wrong" (Leviticus 25:17) - that is wronging of words. And the language of the Sifra (Sifra, Behar, Chapter 4:1-2) is, "'And you shall not wrong, one person his kinsman' - this is wronging of words. If he were a penitent, he should not be told, 'Remember what your former deeds were like, etc.' He should not say, 'how much is this object,' [when he knows he will not purchase it]." And they said (Bava Metzia 58b), "Wronging of words is greater (worse) than financial wrong. For with financial wrong, it is stated, 'you shall not wrong'; whereas with wronging of words, He said, 'and you will fear your God.'" And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in [Chapter] 1 of [Bava] Metzia. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sales 11.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
- A monetary penalty
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
- Restitution (tashlumin)
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding
Two readings, side by side
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this is one of them.
In the traditional Jewish reading How the Jewish legal (halakhic) tradition reads and defends this commandment, in its own developed voice — the classical reasons given for the commandments (ta’amei ha-mitzvot).
The tradition reads “you shall not wrong one another” here as the prohibition on wronging with words — ona’at devarim — as distinct from overreaching in money.
Maimonides distinguishes this verse from the earlier ban on commercial overreaching and reads it as the prohibition on wronging a fellow with words: taunting him, giving misleading counsel, or recalling to him a past he has left behind. Because the injury lies in the heart and intent, the verse seals it with “and you shall fear your God.”
Maimonides (Rambam), Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Mekhirah 14:12–18; Sefer HaMitzvot (12th c.)
The Talmud gives the standard cases: one must not remind a penitent of his former deeds, nor a convert of his forebears, nor ask a merchant the price of goods he has no intent to buy. Because such wrongs are matters of the heart, the sages attach to them the charge to fear God, who alone knows the intent.
Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b (rabbinic period)Source text: Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b — opens the source text at Sefaria in a new tab
Linked rather than reproduced — Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b: No public-domain or CC0 English translation of this passage is available.
The Sefer HaChinuch gives the reason that a wound inflicted by words can cut deeper than a monetary loss, since it touches the person himself, and so the Torah guards the dignity of the vulnerable against it.
Sefer HaChinuch (13th c.)
Rabbinic citations here link to the source text at Sefaria, a free online library of Jewish texts. Where a public-domain or CC0 English translation — one anyone may reuse — of the exact passage cited has been verified and is short enough to set out in full, the passage is also reproduced here in the source’s own words; where it is not, the citation says which of those conditions it missed. Which passages are reproduced is a matter of licensing, length and verification — never of how much a source matters.
Modern critical scholarship How modern academic biblical scholarship reads this text — the source-critical and form-critical school. Its hedges are shown as it states them; nothing here is presented as settled fact.
Modern source-critical scholarship assigns this text to the Holiness Code (H).
Scholarly confidence in this reading: a scholarly majority.
The catalog reads this law as plausibly aimed against Mesopotamian commercial law regulating but not prohibiting exploitation of the economically distressed — most directly the Code of Hammurabi's pricing regulations (§§108–111) and debt-slavery provisions (§117), which manage rather than contest extractive economic relations — implicitly contrasted by the Jubilee framework's theological grounding: that land belongs to YHWH and Israelites are God's servants (Lev 25:23, 42), making permanent dispossession a theological impossibility; per Weinfeld (*Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East*), the Holiness Code's anti-oppression legislation exceeds ANE parallels precisely in this theological motivation..
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.1-78 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.276 affirmed it
The New Testament
- 1 Thessalonians 4:6 affirmed it 'that no one wrong or exploit his brother in this matter' echoes the anti-defrauding ethic
- James 5:4 affirmed it condemnation of withholding laborers' wages, applying anti-oppression principle
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 83:1-3 (al-Mutaffifin, on those who give short measure) carried a parallel
- Q 26:181-183 carried a parallel
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- code of hammurabi regulation of tavern-keeper pricing and commercial fraud Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§108-111 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi limits debt-slavery to three years, after which the debt-slave must be freed — a Mesopotamian parallel to the Levitical Jubilee's concern with preventing the permanent economic subjugation of the poor, though lacking the theological grounding ('YHWH your God') and far more limited in scope than the Jubilee's comprehensive land-return Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §117 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.
Leviticus 25:17 states, "You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am YHWH your God" (וְלֹא תוֹנוּ אִישׁ אֶת־עֲמִיתוֹ וְיָרֵאתָ מֵאֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם). The verb ינה (hif'il: הוֹנָה) means 'to wrong, to oppress, to exploit,' and it appears in two distinct contexts in Leviticus 25. In 25:14, it refers to monetary fraud in buying and selling land (ona'at mamon — financial oppression). In 25:17, the rabbis understood it to refer to verbal oppression (ona'at devarim) — wronging someone through words rather than money. This dual application created one of the most expansive categories of prohibited behavior in Jewish law, covering everything from price gouging to emotional manipulation.
The immediate context of Leviticus 25 is the Jubilee legislation — the extraordinary system by which all land sales are to be reversed and all Israelite debt-slaves freed every fifty years. The chapter's driving principle is that the land belongs to YHWH (25:23) and that Israelites are God's servants, not to be permanently reduced to servitude (25:42, 55). Within this framework, 'wronging one another' means exploiting the power differential that arises when someone is economically desperate. The text specifies: when buying or selling, price according to the number of harvest years remaining until the Jubilee — essentially valuing a lease, not a permanent sale. To charge more than the proportional value is to 'wrong' the buyer. The appended clause 'and you shall fear your God' signals that this is a matter of internal disposition, not just external compliance — God sees what no court can detect.
Ancient Near Eastern law codes address commercial fraud extensively. The Code of Hammurabi (§§108–111) regulates tavern-keepers' pricing and punishes fraudulent merchants. Middle Assyrian Laws address theft and commercial dishonesty. But the Levitical formulation is distinctive in several ways: it grounds the prohibition in theology ('I am YHWH'), it extends it beyond commerce to verbal wrongdoing, and it situates it within a comprehensive economic vision (the Jubilee) designed to prevent the permanent accumulation of wealth and power. The Jubilee system itself has no known parallel in the ancient Near East; most scholars consider it an idealized program that may never have been fully implemented (see Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27, pp. 2156–70), but its vision of periodic economic reset is extraordinary.
The rabbinic distinction between monetary wrongdoing (ona'at mamon) and verbal wrongdoing (ona'at devarim) generated two major tractates of legal discussion. For financial exploitation, the Mishnah (Bava Metzia 4:3–12) established that overcharging by more than one-sixth of the market price constitutes fraud, giving the buyer the right to void the transaction. For verbal oppression, the Talmud (b. Bava Metzia 58b) provides examples: do not ask a merchant for a price if you have no intention of buying (wasting their time and raising false hope), do not tell someone who is suffering that their misfortune is due to their sins, do not give bad directions to a traveler. The Talmud declares that verbal oppression is actually worse than monetary oppression, because money can be returned but dignity cannot (b. Bava Metzia 58b). This legal-ethical tradition, grounded in a single verse about Jubilee-era land transactions, became a comprehensive framework for commercial ethics and interpersonal decency.